Where are all the women?

I've seen a lot of articles lately about women in IT, computer science classes, technical industries, etc.  The lack of them, the declining numbers, the declining %'s, how to get more of them, how to pander to their tastes, etc.

My question is, why?  Why all the extra energy for just women?   Are they magical in some way that I'm not aware of?  More deserving of special treatment?  Somehow "better" than any other group that ISN'T getting all this love?  Do the people writing these articles have some sort of ulterior motive of their ultimate porn fantasy?  Why not "Where are all the [insert demographic here]"?

I don't THINK I'm sexist*, but all I want from coworkers and people in the IT (or ANY) industry is people I can get along with and can do the job.  Women, men, Antareans, amoebas, fungi; I don't care.  Do your job, don't keep me from doing mine, help me when you can and I'll do the same.  




* Before you comment, me being sexist would be me saying I want fewer women or to somehow make it harder for them, which I'm not.  What I'm saying here is... I don't care if there are more, OR fewer.  All I want is qualified people.

Stuff I Did Today

It was officially a holiday for me, so I didn't get any real work done.  That's unusual; if I'm home, I usually work.  Mostly off the books.

• I can't seem to be able to ask a question without people thinking I have an ulterior motive, thinking I'm complaining about something, or something else negative.  I guess I only have myself to blame, but I'm honestly generally just asking.   I think I've figured out a way to try and not trigger everyone's eye-rolling reaction to me; we'll see if it works.  I often wonder if I'm slightly autistic because I appear to be very, very bad at reading social cues.  I thought working from home would help; it pretty much hasn't, but possibly made it worse.
• I learned (or rather, read), that diesel engines don't have a throttle.  They adjust power by varying fuel/air ratios.  My next car will probably be a diesel.
• Downloaded a free FPS and played that.  Fun, no subscription, and satisfies my gaming urge.
  

Stuff I Did Today

• Was completely misunderstood.  By 2 people.  On 2 different circumstances.  Sometimes working from home sucks.
• Did unnatural things to our QA box with gobs of data it'd never seen before.  CPU was at 100% and load averages hovered above 10 a good bit of the day.

That's about it.  BigDataLoadTesting took my whole day.

Stuff I did today

• Installed ruby on our QA box.  Finally.
• Navigated treacherous object dependencies and got a bulk data generation script running well enough to not puke out internally inconsistent data.
  
• Learned about Oracle's bulk loader.
• Sicced a new employee on an irksome bug report like a dog on a pork chop.

A good day.  Even managed to squeak out a few "good dad" moments.